Who is the Catalan architect whose distinctive style is characterized by freedom of form, voluptuous color, and texture, and organic unity, seen in his iconic works like “Sagrada Familia?â€
MANILA, Philippines - He was born in the province of Tarragona in Southern Catalonia, Spain in 1852. The artist’s parents Francesco and Antonia both came from a family of metalsmiths. Showing an early interest in architecture, he went to study in Barcelona, then the political center of Catalonia as well as Spain’s most modern city.
His style of architecture went through several phases. After graduating from the Provincial School of Architecture in Barcelona in 1879, he practiced a rather florid Victorianism that had been evident in his school projects, but he quickly developed a manner of composing by means of unprecedented juxtapositions of geometric masses, the surfaces of which were highly animated with patterned brick or stone, gay ceramic tiles, and floral or reptilian metalwork.
The general effect, although not the details, is Moorish as Spain’s special mixture of Muslim and Christian design is called. Examples of this style are the Casa Vicens (1878-80), El Capricho (1883-85), the Guell Estate and Guell Palace of the later 1880s, mostly located in Barcelona.
Next, he experimented with the dynamic possibilities of historic style: the Gothic in the Episcopal Palace in Astorga (1887-93) and the Casa de Los Botines in Leon (1892-94), and the baroque in the Casa Calvet in Barcelona (1893-1904).
After 1902, his designs eluded conventional stylistic nomenclature. Except for certain overt symbols of nature or religion, his buildings became essentially representations of their structure and materials. His Villa Bell Esguard (1900-02) and the Guell Park (1900-14) in Barcelona and the Colonia Guell Church (1898-1915), he arrived at a type of structure that has come to be called equilibrated, that is, a structure designed to stand on its own without internal bracing, and external buttressing.
Among the primary elements of his system were piers and columns that tilt to transmit diagonal thrusts and thin sell, laminated tile vaults that exert very little thrust. He applied his equilibrated system to two multi storied Barcelona apartment buildings — the Casa Battlo and the Casa Mila, several floors of which are structured like clusters of tile lily pads with steel beam veins.
As was so often his practice, he designed the two buildings, in their shapes and surfaces, as metaphors of the mountainous and maritime character of Catalonia.
A devout Catholic, he later devoted his life to his religion and his Sagrada Familia, which he designed to have 18 towers, 12 for the 12 apostles, four for the evangelists, one for Mary, and one for Jesus, was unfinished at the time of his death in 1926.
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